Factories and Cities

What Tools Tell Us

My father wore a darkness under his cap,
worry cast out from his forehead
like a visor, a dead wing, as though
this might keep him hidden from
something that would not appear.

What did Norwegians ever know
but poverty and cold? And the sea.

What have the parents left us
but tools and some stories?
—the tools, hard earned, carved from winter,
and the stories quarried out of hard times.

Sometimes I feel an urgency gnawing
at the clocks, like a room I enter fatally
familiar, an anxiety at night in the floor
boards as though I can hear him pacing,
or the house were creaking like a ship...

I am the son of a laborer,
whose years were worn into his hands,
which had learned to obey machinery:
oil valves and gauges that required
his daily life, pipe line that fed
with dinosaur-light the engines—
and fed more money into the banks
and less into the hands of workers.

From my father I learned reverence
for the ancient oak, and the snail
in its tiny portable cave— and I learned
a way to listen from what he knew
and loved and worked with hands
that could feel into the habits of things:

the splintering wood that required
a delicate touch, chisels honed keen
as surgical instruments, dangerous
hammers that could wound, quick
sharp axes friend or foe, the power saw
with whose singing whirr serenity
was married like a velocity-mirror
that would throw back the undevoted blood—
tools that are the means and meaning
of the earth and punctual as lightning
writing its swift sinew across the sky.

I learned we could make the world work
only if we attended to it with patience...

One time he took me far up, with my child's
feet and heart, which knew how to celebrate
the tall days—we ascended the spiraling
stairs of the petroleum tank, like scaling
the face of a huge god. I looked down
over the city and saw from the people below
how small we were upon the immense prairie!

I know now what bothered him those many
years. He knew what hunger was—a fact.
The Depression of the Thirties was more
than a memory from which he had never
returned. He knew that hunger came invisibly,
like a stealthy intruder entering the clocks,
stealing everything, first eating the tools,
then the house, and at last the stories...

Once I saw the world in freedom
(only for a moment at the place he worked).
It was a glimpse, a time when I knew
my eyes were awake! I went to grab a wrench:
it glowed like a signature in the dusk!
Ancestors had left it for us, made it, given it,
molded by their hands and passed on to ours.
Then I realized how the tools are owned—
by strangers, who do not use them, nor love them.

Now I know that for a long time the tools
have been imprisoned and stolen from us,
put into bondage the same as our labor.
Our hands mourn for them like kin.
And I know that we are also enslaved,
because our hands are chained to the tools—

They are the covenant with the land,
and we must talk to the land,
or: it will eat us with silence...

It is simple:

we must free the tools to free ourselves—

what a returning destiny!